The New York Times' obsession with Twitter is getting a little creepy. Since May 1st, it has racked up seven articles about Twitter, including, confoundingly, a blog entry about how a U.S. commander in Iraq doesn't use it. And that's not even counting the references: In his Bits blog entry What Annoys Me About Twitter on April 22, Saul Hanson provided his own count of 32 references that day—one of them being, serendipitously, Why I'm Obsessed With Twitter. What might have pulled the proverbial finger from the dyke—oops, dike—was Oprah Winfrey's decision to become a late adapter a few days
earlier—live! AND ALL IN CAPS!—which caused Twitter traffic (Twaffic?) to
jump by 43 percent.
It's okay to get all excited about new-fangled phenomena, but this is a little extreme. Yesterday's Sunday Styles piece, A Night Out With the Twitter Guys, is like the New York Times starring in an episode of MADE called "I Want to Sit at the Cool Table!" It's The Real Housewives of New York's Ramona dressing like her daughter. It's a little pathetic. The average age of the NYT's reader is 45.9, which falls in the age range that makes up 5 percent of Twitter's demo. The average NYT reader doesn't need 24-hour bulletins on Twitter, nor to hang out with the Twitter Guys, who, by the way, seem like fabulous dinner companions—they spent most of the evening staring into their phones, tweeting. (And, um, look at them. This is the cool table?)
The NYT needs to calm down already and to stop trying to be as hip as its kids. Their brains are wired differently, they're moving faster than you are, don't be so desperate to keep up. You might rip a tendon.
photo via New York Times
UPDATE: Browsing through Gawker this morning I came across this item about writer Dan Baum Twittering his experience of getting hired and fired by the New Yorker. Unfortunately, Gawker's also gone all breathless over Twitter in recent months too—no doubt a result of its shift into its more advertising-friendly corporate environment of late—and applauds this gimmicky move as the future of journalism, right here right now. Except: Come on. He's just writing an essay 140-characters-at-a-time, creating serial tweets that can't possibly hold up individually but require a separate forum to string each tweet together. It's an embarrassingly transparent gimmick. It ain't tweeting, it's twatting.
UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Dan Baum explains his rationale behind the micro-serialization here. It's an interesting argument. Still, I call bullshit.
